Building Bridges – the wrong moment?/ Brücken schlagen – unzeitgemäß?

When the ELit Literaturhaus Europa (Literature House Europe) was first launched, we undertook a small experiment with our authors, an idea called readme: ‘You tell me what you read and I’ll tell you who you are!’ (http://readme.cc). We felt distinctions like ‘Either books or Digital Media’ were superfluous, even more so ‘Ink good, Computer bad’. We’re passionate readers and we work with digital media and celebrate the opportunities they’ve brought to literature. Seeking and surfing: communicating culture via old and new technologies.

Whenever I think about the development of this experiment on readme.cc, our European literature platform, in the creation of our European Literature Days and now in the evolution into Literature House Europe, I’m amazed by the breath-taking speed with which information technology is changing our lives. But I find this speed paradoxically numbing – and unsettling. Because it’s clear to me that our collective, careful search for a new and up-to-date work domain for literature, which we began in 2002, created a rest area for literature, a virtual as well as a real redoubt, insulated from the raging neo-liberalism of our times. We’re well set up against this world of frenzied entertainment, I said to my colleague Beat, we’ve prepared well for the time we’re obviously living through, even though we don’t have a name for it. It’s astonishing, how innovative thought and conservative mind-set meet in such a situation. Twelve years previously, we were renegades from the literature business. We were even called ‘literary wreckers’ by the most zealous of the self-appointed guardians of the intelligentsia. How often did I hear the accusation that online texts had as good as abandoned their artistic value! And how we were dismissed as stupid semi-nerds, when we coolly talked about hypertexts and e-books! And all because we were inquisitive…

We’re still doing it. We’re trying to create real meetings of the mind and of the senses in literature. We’re trying to build bridges between cultural technologies, between cultures and languages, between the diverse mentalities of different generations in a whole range of countries. That’s what Literature House Europe is about. Take, for example, the link between the comic and the graphic novel. The geographic closeness of the towns of Spitz and Krems along the Danube provided the initial stimulus. Crucially, the wonderful artistic director of the Krems Museum of Caricature, Gottfried Gusenbauer, was the second. It was his wholehearted wish to bring these two genres together, though without himself taking the leading role. We had invited Comic artists and writers to the European Literature Days the previous year. That doesn’t seem especially sensational. Even the Arts pages (Feuilleton) didn’t seem to know what to make of it. Demarcation lines are quickly drawn up and are just as quickly swept away. The history of literature is the history of crossing lines. The coming together of the Literature Days and the Museum of Caricature is a complex matter, which requires effort and courage. We’re asking two genres with very different codes of conduct to meet in Spitz an der Donau. Exciting, I think!